enraged_camel posted:

I worked as a volunteer for several years teaching financial literacy to high school kids and their families after school. Questions like this were asked often by those who attended, because people a) found the information very useful and b) were stunned that it wasn't part of regular curriculum.

Why isn't it part of regular curriculum? The simple answer is that there aren't many teachers who are qualified to teach the subject. Many teachers are themselves terrible with money. They are either up to their eyeballs in debt, or are married to rich husbands and have never had to create a budget for anything in their private lives. If they tried to teach the subject, it would be like the blind leading the blind.

Cultural factors also play a big role. A lot of financial literacy advice is frugal in nature: eliminate unnecessary spending and debt, watch out for hidden costs, live within your means, etc. In my experience, American families have huge problems with this, because they have been conditioned from a very early age that money exists to be spent, and the more you spend it in visible ways, the higher your social status becomes. We have had many kids confide in us that they learned something useful in class, shared it with their parents, only to be told that it was nonsense. To make things worse, these kids were almost always from low-income families.